Improving the health of mineralized tissue, including bone and teeth, by the delivery of minerals are important goals in the dental and orthopedic fields. In preventive dentistry, there is a strong desire to simultaneously deliver minerals, such as a calcium and fluoride, in an attempt to reduce dental wear and erosion, the formation of caries, and hypersensitivity. With respect to fluoride-based dental vehicles, such as toothpaste, conventional mineral treatments are only marginally effective in providing useful minerals. This is due in part to the undesirable interaction of calcium and fluoride, which can reduce vehicle efficacy. In orthopedics, implant coatings or pastes are desired to stimulate favorable biological responses and integration, but conventional means often illicit these responses too slowly.
Clearly then, there is a need for mineral delivery compounds that can aid in the reconstruction of weakened teeth and bones. The embodiments discussed herein, address these needs.
With respect to creating well-ordered materials spanning dimensions from nanometers to micrometers, typical synthetic methods may include quenching, annealing, compression, precipitation, and nucleation and growth reactions. While these methods each are characterized by their own advantages and disadvantages, there remains an overarching need for an economical and powerful method of creating mixed-phase materials manifesting ordered morphologies. Advantages of creating such a hybrid material may include, for instance, the ability to combine soft and hard components to produce a hybrid material that can be combined in the presence of other reagents in a medium without compromising either the integrity of the hybrid material or the reagents, while simultaneously improving the overall properties of the medium comprising all components. There exist technological challenges and opportunities in developing methods to create blended materials from individual starting materials manifesting unique chemical and physical properties without distorting specific properties of certain starting materials. Such a method, then, is highly desired and is the focus of the present novel technology.
Thus, there remains a need for a method of creating hybrid materials, where specific properties of the starting materials are left intact, in order to produce a hybrid material with properties designed for specific applications. The present novel technology addresses this need.